Just a month ago, former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan was a front-runner in the campaign to succeed Dave Bing as mayor of Michigan’s largest city.

Now he is a man without a place on the August primary ballot, the victim of a a jealous mayoral rival and appellate judges bent on subordinating the rights of voters to a literal and absurd interpretation of the law.

Tuesday’s Michigan Court of Appeals ruling sustaining Duggan’s disqualification — on the absurd grounds that he violated Detroit’s charter by turning his campaign petitions in too far in advance of the May 14 qualifying deadline — likely marks the end of a mayoral campaign that has been under way for two years. Barring an unlikely reversal by the state Supreme Court, Duggan has little or no chance to contest the ruling before Saturday, the statutory deadline to print ballots for Detroit’s Aug. 6 mayoral primary.

But make no mistake: The real victims of Tuesday’s ruling are Detroit voters, who have once again watched the judicial system that is supposed to protect their voting rights be exploited in order to trample them.

Until perennial also-ran Tom Barrow asked the courts to intervene in the mayoral election last month, no one in Detroit’s Election Department had challenged Duggan’s eligibility. Not City Clerk Janice Winfrey, whose office assured Duggan that he was complying with the law when he filed his qualifying petitions last April 2. Not the nonpartisan Detroit Elections Board, which explicitly rejected Barrow’s objections when it certified Duggan’s candidacy last month.

Yet, if we are to believe the Court of Appeals panel that struck Duggan from the ballot Tuesday, “the language of the charter could not be any more clear or unambiguous”: Duggan was legally forbidden to file his nominating petitions until April 12, the first anniversary of his registration as a resident of Detroit. By submitting them in advance of that deadline, Judges Christopher Murray and Michael Talbot insist, Duggan forfeited his eligibility for the Aug. 6 primary.

The absurdity of the court’s reasoning is self-evident. The purpose of any residency requirement is to assure that candidates enjoy some minimal familiarity with the constituency they seek to represent. Yet, according to the Court of Appeals’ logic, a candidate who became a resident of Detroit a month later than Duggan did could have satisfied the residency requirement merely by waiting five or six weeks longer to drop off nominating petitions.

And if Duggan was clearly precluded from dropping off his own petitions until April 12, as Judges Murray and Talbot contend, wasn’t the city clerk charged with enforcing the one-year residency requirement obligated not to accept them before then?

After all, Duggan isn’t the only one whose options were circumscribed when the clerk’s office assured him everything was in good order. What about the 996 Detroit voters who signed his petitions, whose endorsements have now been rendered worthless? And what about the men and women, including incumbent Mayor Dave Bing, who might have run for mayor themselves if they had reason to suspect that Duggan was ineligible?

Duggan’s sin, at worst, was the sort of technical violation that judges have long disregarded in favor of allowing voters to choose from the largest possible field of qualified candidates. The rationale for deferring to the electorate’s judgment was most clearly articulated more than 30 years ago, when the Michigan Supreme Court declared, in the case Meridian v. City of East Lansing, that “all doubts as to technical deficiencies or failure to comply with the exact letter of procedural requirements are resolved in favor of permitting the people to vote and express their will on any proposal subject to the election.”

But last August, in a decision that ironically resurrected last November’s referendum on Michigan’s controversial emergency manager law, four Republican state Supreme Court justices said they were having second thoughts about letting voters decide, even when challengers raised legitimate questions about a petition’s technical sufficiency.

Now the Court of Appeals has taken the next step, essentially neutralizing voters who had expressed a clear preference for Duggan.

In excluding Duggan from Detroit’s primary ballot, the Court of Appeals gives notice that Michigan’s judiciary is done with deferring to voters; soon the courtroom, not the voting booth, may be the venue in which most elections are won or lost.